Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?

So he seems open to reincarnation as a possibility at the very least.

Oh, footnote 18 in End of Faith (page 242 in my copy):

There may even be some credible evidence for reincarnation. See I. Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of
Reincarnation (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1974), Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1984), and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (West-
port, Conn.: Praeger, 1997).

I disagree. If you test your hypothesis many times, and your hypothesis yields results no better than chance guessing, why is that not evidence against your hypothesis?

What would you need as evidence against your hypothesis? Would we need to show that those with claimed NDEs do worse than what would be expected by chance guessing?

Studies about NDE's tend to be hindered by factors such as how rare the phenomenon is the conditions, and a possibility of lessened interest in the phenomenon due to sensationalist media articles that misrepresent certain studies with claims they "explained" them.

If the subject does have an OBE, at that moment he has many other more important concerns, is distracted by and focused on seeing his body, and probably is quite upset by the radically different and bizarre environment, and by the condition of his body. 

Then why don't you ask the dead how they would do the experiment? Surely if there are many dead people out there speaking to mediums, can not one suggest an experiment to a medium that could detect their presence? With so many deceased wanting to communicate with us, you would think one would make the attempt.

I have suggested one experiment. You tell interested cancer patients with limited time to live that you will have an experiment in a particular room at a particular time where a person will pick up playing cards at random. After these people die, their job will be to read those cards and report the state to mediums.

If that is not good enough, as Donald Trump might say, "Dead people, if you are listening, find a way to make your presence clear." Can't one of them suggest an experiment we could do to prove they are alive?

I disagree. If you test your hypothesis many times, and your hypothesis yields results no better than chance guessing, why is that not evidence against your hypothesis?

What would you need as evidence against your hypothesis? Would we need to show that those with claimed NDEs do worse than what would be expected by chance guessing?

I would need people to stop reporting NDEs & OOBEs.

I suspect as resuscitation technology gets better the volume of NDEs will increase, as noted in the paper I link to below. With better study design I think a hit can come.

Sometimes you just need a single white crow ->

Scientists Didn’t Believe in Meteorites Until 1803

The l’Aigle meteorite fall involved more than 3,000 pieces of rock and numerous witnesses, and it changed everything

As to the recent state of NDE research, I'd look at the conclusion from What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death? by Dr. Sam Parnia & Tara Keshavarz Shiraz:

Scientific advances have increasingly challenged societal views regarding death. While understanding what
happens when we die remains a mystery, however, it is now amenable to objective scientific scrutiny. Based on
the balance of probabilities and the evidence to date, it is proposed that the entity referred to as “consciousness”,
“psyche” or the “self”, does not become annihilated; but instead continues after permanent death. As demonstrated
in this essay, evidence to support this comes from several sources. Firstly, recalled experiences of death are
incompatible with “unreal” experiences. Instead, indirect scientific studies indicate they share consistent features
with “real” experiences. Second, are the weight of testimonies and paradoxical claims of consciousness and
external visual awareness by an estimated 800-850 million people in relation to death, that have been confirmed
by at least one large scale cardiac arrest study. This is when the brain is at best severely disordered, or non-
functional. Third, although the time taken for brain cells to become irreversibly damaged and “permanently die”
in a cadaver during the post-mortem period can last hours to days, however, the brain as an organ loses function
within seconds of the heart stopping. Thus, if vital aspects of consciousness continue fully in this early phase of
death, then it is unlikely that they will become annihilated later since the brain itself remains non-functional.
Overall, these results favor the notion that human consciousness may be a separate, undiscovered scientific entity
to the underlying brain processes and can survive beyond death. While, more future studies are needed, clearly,
the recalled experience surrounding death now merits further genuine empirical investigation without prejudice

Regarding AWARE the paper says:

In recent years, there have been large scale medical studies that have confirmed the reported experiences of death
by many millions of cardiac arrest survivors. The largest of these, AWAreness during REsuscitation (AWARE),
examined the timing of awareness and consciousness in 2060 people undergoing cardiac arrest over a four-year
period across 15 hospitals in the United States, United Kingdom and Austria. Although only 101 survived and
could be interviewed; nonetheless, this study was the first to confirm the occurrence of paradoxical lucidity with
external visual awareness and accurate recall of real and verifiable events during a 3-5 minute period after the
heart had stopped and when the brain was expected to be severely disordered or non -functioning.18 More
specifically, this was the first time that the timing of external visual awareness had been demonstrated to occur in
a scientific study at a time when the heart had actually stopped (rather than before or after). This supported the
claims by Van Lommel and colleagues in 2001, during their study of 344 cardiac arrest patients, which was
published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. One of their patients described external visual awareness
and the ability to see his dentures being removed and could later verify where they had been placed during his
cardiac arrest17. However, they had not been able to accurately time this occurrence

I mean the Hard Problem of Consciousness was stated by Democritus (460 BC - 370 BC)

Intellect: “Color is by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention; in truth there are but atoms and the void.”

Senses: “Wretched mind, from us you are taking the evidence by which you would overthrow us? Your victory is your own fall.”

and the latest results are:

Decades-long bet on consciousness ends — and it’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0

Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues.

Surely if the Materialist gets more time to push for his faith, the NDE supporting proponent also should get additional minutes on the clock?

Though I suspect all of the combination locks could be opened and all the stickers in AWARE could be seen and it wouldn't matter for those who have a strong bias toward disbelief in anything but what Harris rightly refers to as a kind of religious faith in Materialism/Physicalism.

The problem is the tests to test for survival consistently come out negative. See page 368- 371 of How not to Do Survival Research.

The problem is the tests to test for survival consistently come out negative. See page 368- 371 of How not to Do Survival Research.

As noted above by Sam Harris in End of Faith, reincarnation research hasn't been completely negative.

I would agree, however, that there has been no definitive confirmation which is why I've said weeks ago that I think it's reasonable to hold that there is no afterlife.

You are not going to get real-time hits on secret, hidden visual targets. The visual target information has to be a fact for you to have any chance of accessing it. It has to be measured. If you remove the real-time constraint, you can get access to something you will see in the future, but it requires the information to have feelings/emotions attached to it. Feelings/emotions seem to be a result of adding up information over what we understand as  time. But in addition you've also got to be motivated, as motivation seems to be a result of adding up what we understand as the future. (Bem's best tests seem to confirm this). You can't use repeating patterns in the information, as they get smeared out due to interference. You can't trick it either, you've really got to believe it.

Assuming it was a randomly selected timed display, it was indeed measured, by the effects of this information in interacting with some structures of matter and energy, in practice on the random number generator output circuits and on the display electronics. That presumably is all that is required. I don't think it has to actually be measured by human perception. The world doesn't work like that.

Assuming it was a randomly selected timed display, it was indeed measured, by the effects of this information in interacting with some structures of matter and energy, in practice on the random number generator output circuits and on the display electronics. That presumably is all that is required. I don't think it has to actually be measured by human perception. The world doesn't work like that.

I have to admit I don't understand what you are saying here. I don't mean this in an insulting way, just literally not sure what you mean.

Could you elaborate - thanks.

You are not going to get real-time hits on secret, hidden visual targets. The visual target information has to be a fact for you to have any chance of accessing it. It has to be measured. If you remove the real-time constraint, you can get access to something you will see in the future, but it requires the information to have feelings/emotions attached to it. Feelings/emotions seem to be a result of adding up information over what we understand as  time. But in addition you've also got to be motivated, as motivation seems to be a result of adding up what we understand as the future. (Bem's best tests seem to confirm this). You can't use repeating patterns in the information, as they get smeared out due to interference. You can't trick it either, you've really got to believe it.

Yeah motivation seems like a big thing. I'm thinking about a reincarnation case where a phone number is almost perfectly recalled and it seems this is due to emotional motivation:

At age of thirty-six, Hanan traveled to Richmond, Virginia, to have heart surgery. She tried to telephone her daughter Leila before the operation, but couldn’t get through. Hanan died of complications the day after surgery.

At 16 months of age, Suzanne pulled the phone off the hook as if she was trying to talk into it and said, over and over, “Hello, Leila?” The family didn’t know who Leila was. When she got older, Suzanne explained that Leila was one of her children and that she was not Suzanne, but Hanan. The family asked, “Hanan what?” Suzanne replied, “My head is still small. Wait until it is bigger, and I might tell you.”

Before she could read or write, Suzanne scribbled a phone number on a piece of paper. Later, when the family went to the Monsour’s home, they found that the phone number matched the Monsour’s number, except that the last two digits were transposed.

I personally think Bigelow should think twice about giving any money for AWARE type studies, they seem near worthless to me without any consideration on how to increase the chance of a hit.

[Ninshub]

Yeah I think Parnia relayed an NDEr did see something but it wasn't the stickers on the ceiling. So [if I'm right about that,] it isn't a "hit" in the controlled study [setting] but it is another in the witness testimony pile.

Yeah and Kenneth Ring's comment was in 2006, before the Parnia studies.